“That’s a little harder. But still not a killer.”
“It’s just we never do these alone.”
“Well. Tell you what I’ll do.”
“What?”
“I’ll come and stand beside you and we’ll look at them, and I’ll tell you you’re right. Unless of course I think you’re wrong. In which case I’ll tell you that too.”
She laughed.
“Would that help?” He cocked his head at her.
“No. But thank you.”
“You’re always thanking me. Now I have to go to work.” He stood up.
“I do too.”
“So.” He stood across from her.
“Good luck today,” she said.
“Thanks. See you later?”
“Sure.” She brought the flat of her hand up to shield her eyes against the climbing sun. Watching him walk away down the hutong, she wished she knew when later would be and what he wanted to do with her then. When she turned the last corner back to the guesthouse, she saw her driver waiting.
At the villa she went to her big room, flooded with morning, and looked up and down the rows of crates. There was number nineteen, with the gold-decorated white-glazed dish from the Yuan Dynasty; number thirty-one, with its pair of blue-and-white dragon roundel bowls from the reign of Kangxi. She loved them especially.
She sat in the front, before her pots, and clicked on her laptop. She opened the inventory and scanned through it. Everything was there. It was finished and it was cleaned. She scrolled down through, fast, the digital photo images blinking past her subconscious. She had it, okay, she could believe in it. She thought of him standing beside her, large and comforting, telling her yes, she was right. And sometimes telling her she was wrong. This made her give just the tiniest bubble of a laugh. For a second she let herself imagine them together.
In a careful set of keystrokes she encrypted the long document and then entered Dr. Zheng’s most private electronic address. Good-bye to all of you, she thought from her heart to the pots in the room; thank you for having come through my life. And she pressed SEND.
Jack and Anna had eaten, steak and asparagus off hundred-year-old Limoges. They liked eating alone. They had personal assistants who prepared their food and served it, but then they preferred for those people to leave. They liked to wash the dishes together by hand, listening to public radio. They didn’t want employees in the house overnight. They did not even like having guests. They had always been like that, since they’d been together. It was one of the many small resonances that made them happy as a pair.
It was when they were watching sports, later, that he told her. First he turned down the TV.
“What?” she said.
“I want to buy it. Are you agreed?”
“What?” Although she knew.
“The porcelain.”
“How much?”
“Seven hundred ninety pieces. She found ten fakes.”
He felt the little snort of laughter lift her shoulders, next to him. “I meant money.”
“They are quoting one hundred ninety million dollars. I wouldn’t expect to pay that.”
“I should hope not.”
“No,” he said. The real offer would never be made up front. They didn’t expect that and neither did he. The most interesting and climactic part of the deal would begin now, the mutual pushing and posturing and retreating that would bring them eventually to an agreed price.
He would find the negotiation diverting, maybe even obsessive, and with any luck it might sharpen him, polish him a little, but the real match was with his wife. All manner of obstacles in the outside world had proven surmountable, but Anna Sing presented a lifetime of challenge. With her he felt alive. He gave thanks every day for having a woman who was his equal.
At this moment she was giving him the raised eyebrow. “You know what I think. It’s fashion, taste, art-fundamentally unstable.”
“But it doesn’t often lose.”
She closed her eyes and smiled privately, into herself. They’d been covering the same ground for days. “It’s not worth a hundred ninety million.”
“No,” he said softly. “Actually it’s worth more than that. It’s worth two hundred million, three. Ten. It’s the past. It’s objects adored by an emperor. That is something that will never come again. Ever in the world. Xuanfei,” he said, deliberately using her Chinese name and feeling her start, because he never called her that. He dropped his hand down from behind and covered her gently curving abdomen. He was calling on her deeper obligations, and he knew it.
“It’s not that day,” she said.
“Sure it is,” he said, and she laughed, and they slowly moved into a different position on the couch.
“You’ve seen the inventory?”
“All of it.”
“Photos?”
“Everything. Well-I just got it. I have to study it.”
“And?”
“It’s magnificent. Come on. Let’s go look.”
“In a minute.” She smiled that smile he knew, because he was a connoisseur of the many moods of Anna Sing. This smile meant she wasn’t ready to say so, she was going to torture him quite a bit longer and get maximum oppositional points out of it, but eventually she was going to warm to his plan.
“Just wait,” he said, catching her legs on either side of him. “In ten years, if the market continues this way, it’ll be worth three hundred million.”
Bai brought the truck to the address on the north shore of Houhai Lake before dawn, as he had been instructed. He pulled up to the gatehouse, cigarette dangling casually from his hand, and called a gruff, complicit greeting to the guard, who stood drinking tea from a jar. The guard waved him ahead. Wide gates at the rear of the court lay open to a long drive rustling with trees. He could see a rambling white house with curving red roofs. Workmen were waiting.
Bai pulled up to them and shut down the engines.
“The cargo goes in the back there?” said the head man.
“Just so, but let me show you.” He took the man behind and opened the gleaming double doors. He had turned off the freezer before he set out. Still, it was cold. They climbed in and Bai unlocked and slid open the hidden doors in the back. Bai heard a northern expletive of surprise slip from the other man’s mouth.
“The cargo goes in here,” Bai said, flipping a switch to light up the main compartment. Then he turned and stepped back onto the shiny-speckled metal floor of the freezer. “And when you are finished, this compartment must be left completely clean! This is a hygienic carrier!”
“Yes, sir,” the man said, faintly confused. “You can depend on it. Here.” And he gave Bai a stapled, fifty-page document. “The manifest.”
Bai had understood all along that this was a big shipment, many pots, but until he saw this forest of typeset entries he had not truly known. “May gods witness,” he said softly, rifling through it.
“Just get them there,” the man said.
“In this lifetime and the next ten afterward, with ease! Do you think I have ever failed?”
“No. But, younger brother. You’d be well served to move as quickly as your wheels can carry you.” He looked meaningfully at the incredible value implied by the numbers running down the manifest’s right-hand column.
Not until they close the deal, Bai thought, but he wouldn’t say this to this man, whom he did not know and who-he had to assume-knew less than nothing. “Come on.” He placed a brief brotherly hand on the guard’s back. “Let’s load it.”
16
Once Lia turned in her appraisal, she had to wait all through that day and night and until the next morning. Dr. Zheng negotiated. Apparently no pots questions arose, for her phone was silent.
The first morning she had gone out to pick up her dress. It was lovely; it molded to her exactly, and it was a mix of green and russet that brought her to life. She tried it on in the store and then she had to put it on all over again the second she got back to her room. After that she folded it away. It was a dress for an occasion.